These items caught my eye – 13 July 2015

1: Brian Cox’s Weird Science; 2: Shredding Birds and Mincing Logic; 3: A Return to the Question “Was 2014 the warmest year?”; 4: The June Deluge Of 1903; 5: Ethanol And Biodiesel: Guilty As Charged ; 6: Elon Musk is wrong about the land requirements of solar and nuclear, and by a long way; 7: What happened to the sunspots?; 8: It has always been the Sun as new model predicts another ice age; 9: 100% renewables is possible because it was a windy day in Denmark yesterday; 10: Heat wave definitions: if one doesn’t suit us, we will take another one; Please remember to read the comments, as the information (and the links) contained in them often put the main article into context.._____________________________________________

Brian Cox’s Weird Science

Brian Cox — of wide-eyed BBC science spectaculars fame — is lauded as one of science’s leading advocates, and a ‘science communicator’.

But for a man who is so keen to extol the virtues of the scientific method, and its unequalled ability to make sense of the world and how to make it a better place, he seems awfully confused: – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

Shredding Birds and Mincing Logic

That wind farms are ugly is the least of the problems their heavily subsidised, rent-seeking promoters are inflicting on the rest of us. Quite apart from their damage to avian populations, the very process of manufacturing them generates a vast tonnage of toxic waste

Recently, Tony Abbott caused a stir with his entirely rational and reasonable observation that wind turbines are ugly — an opinion that further disturbed Fairfax opinion-page fixture Elizabeth Farelly, who countered that she likes ‘their whiteness and grandeur, and how they catch the morning light like so many celestial beings beamed across the landscape’. The obvious response, once one has recovered from exposure to such fly-blown prose, is that, while beauty will always be in the eye of the beholder, the bottom-line cost of extracting volts from zephyrs presents an irredeemably ugly mess of red ink. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

A Return to the Question “Was 2014 the warmest year?”

This is a repost of a blog post written by a well-known and well-respected climate scientist. To date, it is one of the best answers I have come across to the often-asked question, “Was 2014 the warmest year?” What sets it apart from most articles is its down-to-Earth discussion of probabilities.

INITIAL NOTES:

This is not a discussion of why 2014 might be warmest. For that, you’ll need to refer to the blog post here.

The data discussed in the following post is the old version of the NCDC data, not the newly revised NCEI data introduced with Karl et al. (2015).

The topic of discussion is surface temperature data, not lower troposphere data.

This is not a discussion of adjustments to surface temperature data. It is also not a discussion of the slowdown in global surface warming.

The basis of the discussion is: given the surface temperature data we had in hand at the end of January 2015, could we say that 2014 was the warmest year?

I would like the content of the post to be the topic of discussion on the thread, not the author. If you know who the author is, or have taken the time to search for the blog in which the following post appears, please do not identify the author by name. Later in the day, I will provide an update with a link to the original post and let you know who the author is. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

The June Deluge Of 1903

Yesterday I mentioned the monster deluge that hit London in June 1903. Wanstead Meteo, who keeps track of weather history in that part of the world, wrote this post last year, which offers some fascinating insights: – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

Ethanol And Biodiesel: Guilty As Charged

Bogus biofuel trading costs us millions – while the absurd biofuel program costs us billions

Two notorious crooks are helping us wrap up another sordid episode in the saga of the United States biofuel mandates, while further highlighting how bungled and long past its expiration date the program is.

Congress concocted the mandates over fears that US gasoline demand would rise forever and keep the United States dependent on foreign oil, as America’s supposedly limited reserves were depleted. The mandates currently require that we blend 15 billion gallons of ethanol with gasoline every year, and produce over a billion gallons of biodiesel. They hammer us consumers every time we fill our tanks.

Turning corn into ethanol requires vast amounts of land, fertilizers, pesticides, tractor and truck fuel, and natural gas for distillation. It enriches some farmers but raises animal feed prices and thus the cost of beef, pork, chicken, eggs, fish and international food aid. Biodiesel from restaurant waste oil makes some sense, but making it from palm oil or soybeans has similar negative ecological impacts. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

Elon Musk is wrong about the land requirements of solar and nuclear, and by a long way

Elon Musk appears to be a confused man. For some reason he imagines that if you covered a nuclear power plant with solar panels instead the solar panels would generate more electricity. More evidence that he is an overstretched individual who is at times out of his depth and not some Tony Stark esque figure on the verge of saving the planet – he should leave that to an irrational elderly Argentinian.

I wrote about this a few days ago, but at the time I wasn’t completely convinced Musk would actually have said something so ignorant and stupid. Surely a man out to save the planet with solar panels and batteries would understand something as basic as how much land they occupy. Apparently not.

What happened to the sunspots?

A major redefinition to the way solar sunspot counts are recorded may render a Paris climate agreement unnecessary at this time

Austin, Texas, July 9, 2015 – On June 30, 2015 the globally recognized maximum for the current 11-year sunspot cycle was 81.9. On July 1, 2015 that number suddenly leaped all the way up to 116.4!

Stranger still, the current cycle (Cycle 24) fell from being the 7th weakest sunspot maximum since 1749 to being the 4th weakest sunspot maximum. Cycle 24’s sunspot number jumped by 30 percent, yet its ranking dropped by three places. How can that be?

After a 4-year study, solar astronomers modernized the entire 405-year sunspot history for the first time since its creation in 1849. Now, count tallies more closely match the actual tallies of today’s observers using modern technology. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

It has always been the Sun as new model predicts another ice age

I can see the evidence that the earth goes through warming and cooling cycles. But I have seen no evidence that man-made carbon dioxide emissions have had any significant impact on global climate in general or on global warming in particular. I am more inclined to the view that our climate is overwhelmingly dominated by the Sun – both directly with insolation variations and indirectly through the clouds and the oceans. Solar activity indicates we are approaching – or have arrived at – a new minimum, the Landscheidt Minimum – which will be similar to the Maunder Minimum. Another Little Ice Age in the next decade or two has always been on the cards. – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________

100% renewables is possible because it was a windy day in Denmark yesterday

Another Friday, another rant blog from me about bad energy journalism in the Guardian. Shall we dance!

A pet peeve: continually telling people what the record high wind or solar power output was without mentioning what the average is. This results in all kinds of strange beliefs. For example, the internet is now full of people who believe that Germany gets half of its energy needs from solar panels.

Heat wave definitions: if one doesn’t suit us, we will take another one

Last week we had a heat wave in Belgium. But just a day before it officially became a heat wave, it was already connected to Global Warming. The alarmist on duty is Jill Peeters, a Flemish weather woman: Jill Peeters warns: a heat wave like this one will occur once every 3 years (Dutch). In it a graph that shows heat waves in De Bilt (The Netherlands) are on the rise: – Click here to read the full article_____________________________________________